The Anti-Britney: San Diego Punk Rockers From the ’80s

Punk rockers don’t fade away; they become diplomats to Nairobi, Jiu-Jitsu teachers in Hawaii and medical professors in Massachusetts. Here’s how we know.

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In the early ’80s, an uncommon blend of punk rock and the ’60s mod aesthetic fermented in San Diego to take over the University of California San Diego’s Che Café, formerly a hippie-oriented vegan cafe-cum-music venue. These kids created a vibrant scene that went more or less undocumented until Noise 292 bassist and gig organizer Matthew Rothenberg (above center with later band 3 Guys Called Jesus) reprised his former role in digital form by creating the Che Underground blog in February — a gathering place where members of the scene could post unreleased music, photos and recollections from those times.

Rothenberg managed to track down all sorts of folks from the scene like Dave Rinck, a diplomat in Nairobi whom Rothenberg describes as "kind of a punk Indiana Jones who’s done all kinds of gonzo shit like dodging suicide bombers in Afghanistan and helping Dinka tribesmen herd cows off a landing strip." While not involved in those sorts of hi-jinx, Rinck finds time to play Stooges covers in a Blues band on the wharves of Nairobi (profiles of Rinck, Rothenberg and other scenesters.)

Local music communities like these prefigured today’s socialnetworks, according to Rothenberg. "My thesis is that rock ‘n’ rollscenes were the social networks, before the internet, for teenagers,"
he told us in an East Village bar in Manhattan. "What we hit upon doingthis Che Underground site is putting that back together in a digitalmedium. People have really responded to it — everybody who was anybodyin that little circle has jumped on there."

It was hard work doing everything in real life that happens today, to a great extent, online.

"We were ignored by the media and harassed by the powers that be, hatedby the San Diego Police Department and still the shows went on, the zines were printed and distributed — all pre-internet and pre-homecomputer," said Toby "Lifehater" Gibson via e-mail. "Most kids today have no clue how much work that was back inthe day, making the stuff by hand, advertising however you could anddistributing on foot."

The music that brought them together
remains one of most powerful elements on the Che Underground site. MP3s created from dusty,
one-of-a-kind cassette tapes, live bootlegs and unreleased demorecordings pepper the site. And this is truly vital music, combining apunk vision — still fresh in ’83 — with a warped version of ’60sgarage and British invasion bands.

Stream the Rockin’ Dogs’ "Candy Rock":

It’s exactly what you should be listening to if today’s Mickey Mouse Club graduates have you running for cover.

Much of the scene disbanded in ’84, when leading lights TheMorlocks headed north to San Francisco where the band went through the classic process: get signed, getdropped, break up. They hadn’t spoken much in the 21 interveningyears, but Rothenberg says that "in the past couple of weeks, we’ve hadthem in real time on the blog, reconciling, talking about where theywent wrong — it’s just been amazing. I was not expecting to get TheMorlocks talking to each other online."

Stream The Morlocks’ "One Way Ticket":

Nobody else expected that either — in part because we’ve beenunaware of this music. "The bands that I focused on with CheUnderground have one common trait: they didn’t record," saidRothenberg. "They didn’t distribute a disc. These are things that justdidn’t exist in the public record. These are things that literallyhaven’t been heard in 25 years. This is people listening to themselvesand listening to each other after a quarter century of that cassettebeing in a box. It’s a really powerful experience — a Proustian,
emotional experience to suddenly hear these songs that you loved."

As they trade tales on the CheUnderground blog, these punk rockers — many of whom remain involved inmusic — are gaining valuable perspective on their pasts and theformation of their identities. Most are now in their early 40s, whichRothenberg sees as the ideal time for such reflection.

"People can really step out of themselves and tell the stories nowand understand the importance now, at least to us, of what we did,"
said Rothenberg. "Your late teens and your early 20s are the heroicperiod in your life. You’re a hero and everybody’s your hero, everyonearound you. And you can hurt each other a lot worse than you canlater…. When George Harrison died, Rolling Stone did a nice littleremembrance categorizing him as the first Beatles fan, which I thoughtwas really apropos. It’s like, he’s the third guy to join the Beatles,
but he was already a fan of the other two guys. We were all eachothers’ biggest fans, and this is a chance to be each others’ biggestfans again. We’ve got kids who are only 39 or 40 years old now, insteadof 42 or 43, who are joining the conversation saying, ‘I was always tooshy to talk to you guys. You were my hero.’"

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